The management and maintenance of passwords for hundreds or even thousands of user ids in various development, function test Acceptance Test User (UAT) and production environments for both IBM® AIX® and MVS™ operating systems is burdensome to say the least. (IBM® AIX® and MVS™ are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp. in the United States, other countries, or both.) Regardless of the fact that this is currently a manual operation process that is executed by support personnel, it is an essential and critical function since software security, amongst other things, is of paramount importance. Without proper password maintenance and management, for example, an application would not be able to execute, thus fundamentally and financially affecting an application customer.
By way of example, in current technologies, in addition to other tasks, support personnel maintain passwords for various different applications by manually allocating a number of user ids and passwords. Depending on the specific requirements, passwords may have to be changed as frequently as on a monthly basis. In addition, this same process may have to be repeated for each instance of the application. This is very time consuming and prone to errors and application downtime.
Along with changing passwords often other actions are required to allow the new password to take effect, all of which require a tremendous amount of overhead and resources. For example, when changing the password for a Strategic Client Planning System (SCPS) factory (“factory”) userid, an .Iwprofile must be updated with the new password. To do this, the factory must be shut down, and the factory software must be recycled and restarted. This is a tedious task and due to the fact that the factory has to be shutdown tends to be very costly to the customer. That is, all operations associated with the factory have to be stopped, taken off-line and thus idled until a new password is generated, encoded within the application, and saved in a password file.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.